Sociology. Anthony Giddens
questionnaires are open-ended, giving respondents more opportunity to express their views in their own words rather than limiting them to fixed-choice responses. Open-ended questionnaires typically provide more detailed information than standardized ones. On the other hand, the lack of standardization means that responses are likely to be more difficult to compare statistically, and this limits attempts to draw general conclusions from the study.
Questionnaire items are normally listed so that a team of interviewers can ask the questions and record responses in the same predetermined order, and all the items must be readily understandable to interviewers and interviewees alike. In the large national surveys undertaken regularly by government agencies and private research organizations, interviews are carried out more or less simultaneously across the whole country. Those who conduct the interviews and those who analyse the results could not do their work effectively if they constantly had to check with each other about ambiguities in the questions or answers.
Questionnaires should also take into consideration the characteristics of respondents. Will they see the point the researcher has in mind in asking a particular question? Have they enough information to provide an answer? Will they be able to answer at all? The terms and concepts used in a questionnaire might be unfamiliar to the respondents. For instance, the question ‘What is your marital status?’ might baffle some people, and it would be more appropriate to ask, ‘Are you single, married, separated, or divorced?’ Most surveys are preceded by pilot studies in which just a few people complete a questionnaire in order to pick up such ambiguities and iron out problems that may not be anticipated by the investigator before the main survey is carried out.
An experiment is an attempt to test a hypothesis under highly controlled conditions established by the investigator. Experiments are commonplace in the natural sciences and psychology, as they offer major advantages over other research procedures. In an experimental situation the researcher directly controls the circumstances under study. Psychologists examining individual behaviour use laboratorybased experimentation extensively. However, in comparison with these disciplines, the scope for experimentation in sociology is severely restricted. Most sociological studies, even those of individual actions, look to investigate the relationship between micro- and macrosocial phenomena. To remove individuals from their social context for the purposes of experimentation would make little, if any, sense to many researchers.
Yet, sometimes sociologists want to explore group dynamics – the way individuals behave when in groups – and experiments may then be feasible. Even so, only small groups can be brought into a laboratory setting, and in such experiments people know they are being studied and may behave differently. Such changes in the behaviour of research subjects are referred to as the ‘Hawthorne effect’. In the 1930s, researchers conducting productivity studies at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne plant near Chicago found to their surprise that worker productivity continued to rise regardless of which experimental conditions they imposed (levels of lighting, break patterns, work team size, and so on). Workers were conscious of being under scrutiny and accelerated their normal work pace, thereby undermining the experiments. Nevertheless, as ‘Classic studies’ 2.1 shows, it is possible to learn things about social life from small-scale experiments in social psychology.
In contrast to experiments, biographical research belongs purely to the social sciences and has no place in the natural sciences. Biographical research has become increasingly popular in sociology over recent decades and includes oral histories, narratives, autobiographies, biographies and life histories (Bryman 2015). These methods are used to explore how individuals experience social life and periods of social change and how they interpret their relationships with others in the context of a changing world. In this way, biographical methods allow new voices to enter sociological research, and life histories are a good example.
Life histories consist of biographical material assembled about particular individuals, usually as recalled by the individuals themselves. Life histories have been successfully employed in sociological studies of major importance. One celebrated early study was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, the five volumes of which were published between 1918 and 1920 (Thomas and Znaniecki 1966). Thomas and Znaniecki were able to provide a more sensitive and subtle account of the experience of migration than would have been possible without the interviews, letters and newspaper articles they collected. Biographical research aims to give us a feel for how life is experienced, something that can never be achieved by large-scale surveys and statistical testing. Other methods do not usually yield as much information about the development of beliefs and attitudes over time. Life-history studies rarely rely wholly on people’s memories. Normally, other sources such as letters, contemporary reports and newspaper descriptions are used to expand on and check the validity of the information that individuals provide.
Sociologists’ views differ on the value of biographical methods. Some feel they are too unreliable and subjective to provide useful information, but others see that they offer sources of insight that few other research methods can match. Indeed, some sociologists have begun to offer reflections on their own lives within their research studies as a way of offering insights into the origins and development of their own theoretical assumptions (see, for example, Mouzelis 1995).
Comparative and historical research
Comparative research is of central importance in sociology, because making comparisons allows us to clarify what is going on in a particular area of social life. Take the rate of divorce among opposite-sex couples in many developed societies as an example. In the early 1960s there were fewer than 30,000 divorces per year in England and Wales, but by 2003 this figure had risen to 153,000. However, since 2003 the annual number of divorces has been falling, and in 2017 it stood at 101,669. The divorce rate also fell, to 8.4 divorcing persons per 1,000 married population, the lowest level since 1973 (ONS 2018a). Do these changes reflect specific features of British society? We can find out by comparing divorce rates in the UK with those of other countries. Comparison with figures for other Western societies reveals that the overall trends are in fact quite similar. A majority of Western countries experienced steadily climbing divorce rates over the latter part of the twentieth century, which appear to have peaked early in the twenty-first century before stabilizing or falling back in recent years. What we may conclude is that the statistics for England and Wales are part of a broader trend or pattern across modernized Western societies.
Classic studies 2.1 The social psychology of prison life
The research problem
Most people have not experienced life in prison and find it hard to imagine how they would cope ‘inside’. How would you fare? What kind of prison officer would you be – a disciplinarian maybe? Or perhaps you would adopt a more humanitarian approach to your prisoners? In 1971, a research team led by Philip Zimbardo decided to try and find out what impact the prison environment would have on ‘ordinary people’.
In a study funded by the US Navy, Zimbardo set out to test the ‘dispositional hypothesis’, which dominated within the armed forces. This hypothesis suggested that constant conflicts between prisoners and guards were a result of the conflicting individual characters of the guards and inmates – their personal dispositions. Zimbardo thought this might be wrong and set up an experimental prison to find out.
Zimbardo’s explanation
Zimbardo’s research team set up an imitation jail at Stanford University, advertised for male volunteers to participate in a study of prison life, and selected twenty-four mainly middle-class